> The Opening
> The Transformation
> The Diversity
> Ten Years After
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| Berlin, November 1989 | |||
The year 1956 witnessed several of the defining moments of the Cold War. Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous secret speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes; the Suez Crisis ushered in decades of superpower rivalry in the Middle East; and an anti-Communist uprising in Hungary was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks.
I was born in the United States in 1956, and was brought up to believe that the Soviet Union intended to destroy my country’s way of life and abolish its personal freedoms. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Soviet children were being taught that the United States wanted to corrupt their souls with the selfish ideology of capitalism.
The two superpowers divided the world between themselves and constructed immense psychological barriers to mutual understanding. To sustain popular support it was necessary to demonize the enemy. Ronald Reagan voiced this imperative by repeatedly referring to the Soviet Union during his presidency as the "Evil Empire”.
The Cold War ended on November 9, 1989 as a consequence of the economic collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the desire of its people for greater personal freedom. As a photojournalist based in Western Europe I witnessed the euphoria of thousands of East Germans as they walked through the open wall and into an unknown world. Families and friends were reunited and tearfully embraced each other amid the flowers and champagne being offered by the West Germans. As the divided world of the past fifty years merged into one, I found it emotionally difficult to photograph these scenes.
The ensuing years brought political, economic and social chaos to the countries of the former Soviet bloc, as they struggled to redefine themselves following their emancipation. I had acquired a contract for a major American weekly magazine in the early 1990s and so was able to watch and record the transformation of the so-called Evil Empire for myself.
-American-born photographer Anthony Suau
It was called the annus mirabilis of 1989, the velvet revolution, even the end of history. A totalitarian empire which for nearly half of a century ruled what used to be known as Eastern Europe disintegrated within a few months. As the Berlin Wall came down the echo of falling dominoes could be heard all over Europe. Speed and unpredictability were the key ingredients of what remains the enigma of the implosion of the Soviet bloc: Poland ten years, Hungary ten months, East Germany ten weeks, Czechoslovakia ten days was the motto of the Peoples’ Autumn of 1989. One could add: Romania ten hours and Albania ten minutes! Socialism, according to an East European joke at the time, was the longest and most arduous road from capitalism to... capitalism.
-Czech born academic Jacques Rupnic
> The Introduction
> The Transformation
> The Diversity
> Ten Years After
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| Moscow, Russia 1993 | ||
One day in March 1989, at the height of Gorbachev’s perestroika, I went for a walk around Moscow. The city around me lay in impoverished ruins. Near the Central Market - a huge covered hall where vegetables and meat are sold - elderly men and women were crowded onto the knee-deep mush of yellow snow, selling rugs and potatoes, second-hand socks, sink faucets, or pictures of Stalin as the Generalissimus. An invalid drunk, toothless, legless and reeking of alcohol, cried out to passers-by from his wheelchair. With blackened fingers that looked like rotten carrots, he delicately displayed a series of tiny, matchbox-sized gilded imperial thrones. Each one had elegant, curved legs and blue velvet upholstery. He would set a throne on his horrid palm, or raise it above his head, holding it by one leg and crying out: The Empire on sale! Come closer and see! Who wants the Tsar’s throne?... People didn’t buy the thrones, but they laughed. The Empire for sale, the end will soon come! the drunk laughed as well.
-Russian-born writer Tatyana Tolstaya
As the ‘Iron Curtain’ melted away, I explored the East with an impassioned curiosity. Words cannot adequately describe the depths to which their economies had fallen. The Romanian village of Copsa Mica, which I visited in 1990, was covered in black soot from the local rubber factory. In the East German town of Buna, employees at the chemical factory showed me poisonous mercury dripping freely from the old rusty pipes. In the steel city of Magnitogorsk, I visited an institution housing children with severe, disfiguring birth defects caused by the air and water pollution. The environmental catastrophe was compounded by the economic situation. Daily tasks, such as purchasing food and fuel, had become aggravating and time-consuming. However the people of the East possessed a strength of character and human spirit I had never before encountered. This spirit was based on their deeply held values and knowledge and not their material possessions. I was fascinated by their personal generosity and intelligence, and in a strange way I envied their naiveté about Western attitudes and ideology.
In early 1991, ethnic warfare broke out in the former Yugoslavia. Serb forces battled the armies of Croatia and Bosnia, carving Bosnia-Herzegovina up like a jigsaw puzzle. I had been in Bosnia for fewer than twenty-four hours when I had an experience that showed how insane the war had become. The Serbs in the hills above the town of Travnic had decided to shell an old school building which housed a thousand Bosnian refugees. I stood with women, old people and children as shells pounded the building. The refugees, screaming and crying over the sounds of the explosions, looked at me as if to ask, ‘When will it stop?’ Ashamed, I had no answer.
-Anthony Suau
> The Introduction
> The Opening
> The Diversity
> Ten Years After
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| Moscow, Russia 1994 | |||
For several years I lived in placid, well-fed America, returning to Moscow once or twice a year. I arrived on a visit in the hungry summer of 1992. I called my friends to invite them over for dinner. Can we bring the children? they asked. How strange. Of course they can. And then, horrified, I watched my oddly serious guests sit down with their children and eat in silence until they’d consumed everything on the table. One of them stood up and walked across the room. Suddenly turning pale, he crashed to the floor. What’s wrong? I’ll call a doctor! No, no, don’t bother. That happens sometimes. It happens when a person eats a lot for the first time after many months of hunger. They already knew the symptoms. I was ashamed: I felt like a millionaire among paupers.
I return to a flourishing, well-fed Moscow in 1995. Those same friends’ children who tucked into my nutritious vegetables can’t be bothered to come visit me now. They’ve taken their friends to a restaurant and spent a mere trifle oh, 300 dollars or so, no big deal. They laugh at me: I can’t afford a 100 dollar meal in a Chinese restaurant, and, come to think of it, I look like a hick: I don’t have a fur coat, and I don’t wear designer clothes. Suddenly I am a country cousin, amusing in her backwardness. Where do people get all this money?
-Tatyana Tolstaya
Boris Yeltsin, who rose to power after a failed military coup in August 1991, had three main aims: to prevent the restoration of Communism by encouraging the development of a new entrepreneurial elite; to hold Russia together as a state against centrifugal tendencies; and to involve Russia in a long-term partnership with the West. The result, nearly a decade later, is a major economic disaster, the slow but steady disintegration of the state and the predictable re-emergence of an unholy alliance of Communists and nationalists on an anti-Western bandwagon. The privatization scheme turned out to be utterly corrupt, siphoning public wealth into private pockets and forging an unholy alliance between the old nomenclature and the new mafias. If no taxation without representation is the definition of the social contract in a democracy, in Russia it is untaxable wealth plus unaccountable power.
-Jacques Rupnic
In 1995, Russia became enmeshed in a vengeful and brutal civil war with separatists in the southern region of Chechnya, who were seeking greater autonomy from Moscow. Within a few months, the capital city of Grozny had been so heavily shelled by Russian artillery that it became an enduring symbol of the destructiveness of modern warfare. Journalists reported that 900 shells landed in Grozny every hour, a rate of one every four seconds. The resistance put up by the ragtag band of Chechen separatists was so fierce, however, that even Russia’s overwhelming military superiority couldn’t enable it to keep the upper hand for more than a few hours at a time.
Two months into the war, when I arrived in Grozny by Russian military helicopter, most of the city had already been laid to waste. The trees were barren and the ground was furrowed with thick mud ruts. The buildings were windowless, roofless tumbling walls scarred by the pockmarks of a thousand pieces of shrapnel. Around me Russian tanks and Armoured Personnel Carriers ground through the ruts. The soldiers, hardened young teenagers, had been surviving the war one hour at a time.
-Anthony Suau
> The Introduction
> The Opening
> The Transformation
> Ten Years After
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| Moscow, Russia 1996 | |||
Each country has gone its own way. Indeed the term ‘post-Communism’ has lost much of its relevance: the fact that Poland and Albania, Hungary and Belarus, the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan shared a Communist past explains little about the divergent paths they have taken since. Central Europe, with its successful transition to democracy, is back, stretching from the Baltic countries to Slovenia on the Adriatic; the Balkans are showing they deserve their reputation as the powder keg of Europe; Russia, with its unstable periphery, is searching for an identity while it teeters on the brink of political crisis and economic disaster.
The crash of the Russian rouble and the stock market in August 1998 bankrupted the financial system, provoking the flight of foreign investors and destroying the savings of the new Russian middle class. The living standards of the population have been set back twenty years. According to the World Bank’s 1999 annual report the number of people living in poverty in the former Soviet Union increased from 14 million to 147 million, a ten-fold increase. The probability of a fifteen-year-old Ukrainian or Russian male surviving until his sixtieth birthday is a mere sixty-five per cent.
-Jacques Rupnic
By 1997 Poland was experiencing rapidly increasing prosperity. Moderately priced hotels, modern petrol stations and international telephones could be found everywhere. However, Poland’s improving economy had also ushered in an ugly consumerism. Advertisements by corporations such as McDonalds, Marlboro and Coca-Cola filled the vast walls of the old Soviet-style housing projects throughout the country. The fashion favoured by Poland’s teenagers was a cross between the Russian ‘bandit’ look and American rap style, a mixture known in Poland as ‘Dress’. Its popularity extended so deeply into Polish society that teenage boys from rural farms would travel to the nearest disco at night decked out in Dress and imitate the cocky, bullish mannerisms of the bandit.
The East, naive about aggressive Western business practices, had clearly looked to the West as its role model. In turn, it was all too obvious that the West was exploiting the East, rather than helping to reconstruct it. In Gdansk, the birthplace in 1980 of the trade union ‘Solidarity’, I saw a poignant example of this clash. At one end of a one-kilometer long, run-down apartment block which housed nearly 10,000 people sat a colorful new McDonalds, built to capitalize on the contained populace.
-Anthony Suau
Every day the papers are full of news about murders: a banker has been killed, a factory manager has been killed, a lawyer has been killed. At first it’s frightening, then you get used to it. Throughout the country, which is still enormous, there are thousands of tiny copies of Moscow: cities, towns and villages where, on a smaller scale, the same thing is being repeated: corruption, contempt for law, robbery. Whole cities stand unheated and unlit: everything has been stolen. Teachers and doctors haven’t been paid in as much as a year.
-Tatyana Tolstaya
> The Introduction
> The Opening
> The Transformation
> The Diversity
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| Kosovo 1999 | |||
For a short while, at the beginning, it seemed that perestroika would not only cast off the yoke of the Communist Party, but would change the peoples’ way of life and make Russia a part of Europe, of what we call the civilized world. It seemed that society’s new openness would force Russia to look at itself with new eyes, would teach it the fundamentals of democracy and order.The West looked as though it would have enough patience to allow this process to take place; after all, you can’t expect a monster to go to sleep and be transformed into a beauty overnight. There were hopes that the West and Russia would look in each others’ eyes and find understanding. However, Russia and the West (particularly America) turned away from one another in disappointment after a short burst of trust. It seems to me that neither side understood or appreciated that an Iron Curtain had divided our cultures not for seventy years, but for a thousand, and that the wall that stood between us was not in Berlin, but in our world views, in our psychology, in our history.
-Tatyana Tolstaya
More than ever I was constantly struck by the resilience of the Russian people, under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Wherever I travelled, I heard people joking about the troubled times. Many blamed everything on Moscow and reminisced about the good old days of the Soviet Union, when at least some things worked. Young couples with children smiled when asked about the future, and tried to avoid discussing how grim things seemed.
On March 12, 1999, the day I left Russia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic became new NATO members. Within days of this historic event NATO forces began bombing Yugoslavia, seeking to prevent Slobodan Milosevic from carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Albanian population of Kosovo.
-Anthony Suau
Ten years later, the post-totalitarian blues are haunting the lands of the other Europe. The euphoria that accompanied the fall of communism has given way in many countries to disillusionment and the emergence of new threats. The unity of the great mass rallies has vanished, and wide-ranging economic hardship seems to overshadow the political gains made a decade ago. Instead of democratic civil societies one sees a motley landscape: the discreet charm of the new bourgeoisie in Budapest and Prague; a population stalked by poverty in Russia, the return of war in the Balkans.
The twentieth century began with war in Sarajevo. It ends with war in Sarajevo and in Kosovo. The Third Balkan War represents a decade of unspeakable suffering inflicted on civilian populations. It has left over 200,000 dead and generated millions of refugees, with the ideal of a multi-ethnic society being among the casualties. Instead of the much-trumpeted new world order, the post-Cold War age has once again seen the use of force to settle political conflicts in parts of Europe. Most importantly, these have been wars primarily directed against civilians because of who they are. Ethnic cleansing, a new term for an old idea, has not been so much the consequence of war as its primary aim.
-Jacques Rupnic